Exercise 5. Network and Programming frameworks

1. A Simple Chat Client/Server system - I found this simple chat server at
http://wiki.tcl.tk/11005

The codes use sockets to wait for calls or message to be pass through; within that it use handlers to handle each of these participants' nick name and pass through. Once a socket is opened, almost like a session, the data is broadcast to both ends of the socket.

2. Peer to Peer Computing and Grid Architecture or Grid Computing have both similar objectives - both claiming to resolve problems prevail at large scale computing societies and both of which have gained in popularity in the successful deployment and applications (Foster., I & Iamnitchi. A, 2003)

Behsaz. B, Jaferian. P, & Reza-Meybodi. M (2008) defines "Grid computing is a distributed computing approach to create an illusion of simple yet large virtual computer from a large set of heterogonous computers sharing various resource types to benefit a (virtual) organization." where as P2P computing is defined as Global Computing ""Globalcomputing is a distributed computing approach for computing with a large collection of heterogeneous computers which are essentially scattered over the world and sharing various kinds of resources."

P2P tends to be larger in scale due to the popularity in the use of domestic home use computers and often has less accountability and reliability is therefore not very suitable for mission critical type applications or workflow process. On the other hand, Grid computing tends to focus on the sharing of resources of mid-size servers capacity with very reliable DNS/routing/IP address to support the reliability for more "mission critical" or "workflow intensive" applications.

3. Comparision of web development framework.

I have not used any web application development framework; but i will attempt to compare the JAVA framework and the RoR framework.

JAVA - requires the compilation of the code to binarys and requires the Java Virtual Machine to process the binary. Ruby on Rails on the other hand tends to be a very simple and elegant solution to first time programmers as it hides away all the details and troublesome syntax related issues in low level programming languages. Both of the languages are object-oriented programming languages. IBM (2005) published a comparison of the two web development framework and outlines the stack view and clearly shows that RoR has simpler structure.

Reference

Foster. I & Iamnitchi., A (2003) On Death, Taxes, and the Convergence of Peer-to-Peer and
           Grid Computing,  Department of Computer Science, University of Chicago.

Behsaz. B, Jaferian. P, & Reza-Meybodi. M (2008) Comparison of Global Computing with Grid
       Computing . Department of Computer Engineering and Information Technology, Amirkabir
       University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic), 424 Hafez ave., Tehran, Iran
       Retrieved on http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~behsaz/Publications/GlobalvsGrid-TR.pdf

IBM (2005) Ruby on Rails and J2EE: Is there room for both? Two Web application frameworks compared.
 Retreived on http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-rubyonrails/